BURLINGAME — The two main GOP candidates for governor, Tim Donnelly and Neel Kashkari, aggressively wooed delegates at their party’s state convention Saturday, despite party leaders’ tactical decision to focus on down-ticket races instead this year.

Though still a focus of delegates’ attention, the top-of-the-ticket candidates for the first time in recent memory were receiving a distinct “you’re on your own” vibe from the party’s highest echelons. And their reactions matched their personas.

“I have never heard such nonsense,” Donnelly said Saturday. “It is a bunch of gibberish.

“We had to negotiate with our own party in order to speak here,” added Donnelly, a firebrand conservative assemblyman from Hesperia. “They’re terrified that somebody who takes strong positions … might represent them. But that’s how you win.”

The more moderate Kashkari, an asset manager from Orange County and former U.S. Treasury Department official, said he agrees “the lower races are very important” and hopes his campaign’s tide will lift GOP boats further down the ticket.

Beating Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown will be “absolutely hard,” he added, “but we have so many examples nationally of very strong incumbents losing”­ — though the examples he cited were from 1994, when Republicans unseated New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and Texas Gov. Ann Richards.

Yet some at the three-day convention see Kashkari, a 40-year-old IndoAmerican, as a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) who is soft on gun rights because he supports gun background checks, oversaw the U.S. government bailout of Wall Street at the beginning of the Great Recession — and even voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Other Republicans see Donnelly as an extremist former Minuteman anti-immigration activist who couldn’t possibly win a general election against a popular incumbent.

State GOP Chairman Jim Brulte and Vice Chair Harmeet Dhillon said Friday that statewide races won’t be the state party’s focus this year; instead, they’ll look for congressional, legislative and victories at the local level.

Brown’s enormous campaign war chest and relatively high poll numbers make him look unassailable. And while he’s still scorned by many at the convention, some say privately that Brown at least put the brakes on what could have turned into a runaway spending after Democrats captured overwhelming majorities in the Assembly and Senate.

Two lesser-known Republicans are also running for governor: Andrew Blount, an entrepreneur and mayor of Laguna Hills, and Glenn Champ, a Fresno County businessman and “Christian soldier.” Each of the four candidates will deliver a brief speech Sunday, but they were added to the agenda only this past week, sparking speculation that Brulte had hoped to avoid airing an ideological divide.

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Perhaps a divide was unavoidable, however, as many at the convention clearly were falling into the orbits of either Donnelly or Kashkari.